The Impossible Portait. Georges Perec and His Condottiere

Abstract

Continuous and more or less veiled references, descriptions, inventions, images characterize the poetry of Georges Perec. But above all one image is significant not only to his poetics but to himself: that of Le Condottière, translated in english as Portrait of a Man. On 2012, thirty years after Perec’s death, the last piece of his literary image was discovered. Actually, it is the first image of this complex puzzle, the first time Gaspard Winckler, Perec’s recurrent alter-ego, appeared on the scene. Three main characters stay on the stage of Portrait of a Man: Gaspard Winckler, Antonello da Messina and the unknown warlord himself. Behind them stays, of course, Perec, the “character” into which all the others flow, that they somehow have built or depicted. And, probably, it is his own image, his own portrait that Perec is trying to depict through each of them, by writing of and on each of them.